The Eye-Fi Mobi Gets Upgraded

I’ve been using an Eye-Fi Pro X2 8GB for a few years now. I love the convenience of having pictures just magically appear on my computer, but it isn’t without issues. The two issues that bug me the most are low flash memory speeds and high power consumption. Despite those, I still use it frequently, especially when I have strong WiFi and ready access to charged batteries.

The Pro can transfer pictures to a phone or through the cloud to a PC running the software. Sending via the Eye-Fi servers is very flexible. You can even configure it to push the photos to an FTP server somewhere. The issue there is that all photos upload to the web, then come back from the web. If you’re bandwidth is asymmetrical like mine that can cause a bottleneck. The older Android app drained my battery too rapidly, so I uninstalled it and never looked back.

The Eye-Fi Mobi drops the cloud and PC portions and transfers the photos directly to a phone. They also appear to have fixed the phone power consumption, mostly I suspect because the phone only has to transfer the photos to itself and not pass them on to the web. Of course you have to have some free space on the phone and you have to eventually transfer them off the phone, but in the meantime it’s easy to share the photos online before you get back to a computer. I was even able to sync a few photos instantly with DropBox by copying them to the DCIM/Camera folder. The app itself is lacking in any real features other than a share icon, but it’s easy to just let it do the transfers and switch to a different app for editing, organizing and sharing.

I tested the Mobi card with my Galaxy Note II phone and had no issues with transfers. The phone does watch for the card’s ad-hoc network and will join it for the duration of the transfer. With casual use most users won’t ever notice it, but after shooting 50 quick photos I did get a wonky error from Foursquare. It cleared as soon as the photos were done transferring. I was pleased to see the Mobi is rated as a class 10 card, and while my tests showed it was faster the the older Pro model it still fell short of the Sandisk cards. It was still fast enough for lengthy HD videos, and some short bursts of rapid fire shooting at RAW+JPG.

The card comes in 8, 16, and 32GB capacities with a price from $45 to $100. I think it’s a little pricey, but I love the convenience of having a backup of the photos and another means to share (or even edit) the photos without a PC. The 32GB and lower Eye-Fi Mobi models are available on Amazon for about $99.